Surgery story

We got to the hospital (IMC) on Wednesday morning at 5:30, bright and early--and then sat in the waiting room for about an hour, waiting for our turn. (I will never understand this.) Once they actually let us back I got in my fashionable little hospital gown and they wheeled me into a little room where I met with everyone that was going to be attending my little party over the next 12 hours: general surgeon, plastic surgeon, anethstesiologist, surgical nurse, and someone else I've forgotten. We all talked about exactly what we were doing so everyone was on the same page. It was probably a good thing since the general surgeon was under the impression that we were only doing a single mastectomy when the plan was to do both.

After we got that clear, my plastic surgeon got out the sharpie and started marking me up. The fun part was when she drew the incision on my belly where they would be removing the tissue to build the new breasts. It went from hip to hip and it took it ALL.  I was quite excited about that part.

The next 12 hours are a little fuzzy. I don't even remember them taking me into the operating room or saying goodbye to Neil. I'll see if I can get Neil to fill in the blanks in a different post. The next thing I remember is someone calling my name and a stabbing pain in my right calf. I vaguely remember  being confused at the location of the pain and yelling, "Why does my leg hurt?" Apparently my leg had been lying on top of a small cord for 12 hours and had developed a huge knot in the calf muscle that was about 4 inches long. That was a little unexpected. So Neil spent the next little while trying to work the knot out of my leg.

The first 24 hours after I came out of surgery were spent in the Intensive Care Unit. They had to carefully monitor the transplanted tissue to make sure that circulation was well established. The plastic surgeon had to connect the dissected blood vessels in the tissue from my belly to the dissected blood vessels in the tissues in my chest. If the circulation wasn't good, then the tissue would die and we'd have to start all over again.

They checked the circulation by monitoring the color of the skin and poking me a lot. When you poke yourself, you normally see a white spot the size of your finger tip where you have pushed the blood out of the veins. After a second, it turns pink as the heart fills the veins with blood again. That shows good circulation. So I was constantly getting poked.

I also had four tubes coming from my body that were draining blood and body fluid from the surgical sites. Two were in my upper abdomen and two were in the lower abdomen. The nurses were constantly emptying these out. The fluids need to get below 30 ml per day before they can be removed.

After 24 hours, they moved me from ICU to a regular hospital room. I was hooked up to an drug pump that would give me a shot of some sort of narcotic once my pain level got too high. Over the last couple of years, I've learned to be a lot more tolerant of pain, but that doesn't mean that I won't do everything I can to avoid it, so I made sure to push that little button every time I thought of it. Fortunately for me, the machine is set so patients can't self administer too much drugs, but I still just thought I should make sure I was getting my money's worth.

I spent four nights in the hospital and as miserable as I was most of the time, I did notice that my pain levels were improving each day. Even that early on. The first time they had to move me to a different bed (when I left the ICU), I thought I was going to die. I had two nurses on either side of me and they just lifted me up in the sheet that I was lying on and slid me over to a different bed. That one hurt. I felt like someone had tried to cut me in half. Well, I guess with an incision from hip to hip, that wasn't too far from the truth. I wasn't feeling much from the chest area. Nerve endings had been severed so there wasn't a whole lot of sensation from that area. It was the tummy tuck that felt like it was going to kill me. But the next time they had to move me from the bed--when I got up to take a shower--it wasn't nearly as bad, so it got a little better each day.

So three more nights in the hospital and I was feeling well enough to come home. We left the hospital around 7 pm on Saturday night. One of my angel neices had taken my kids for the weekend so the house was quiet. It was nice. Neil, the genius that he is, set up the bed we just bought Lily so it bent just like a hospital bed. I had to have both upper body and legs elevated. It was quite the task to figure out how to make me comfortable while wearing a super, hot surgical bra--something that literally held me together from neck to belly button, a binder that was 8 inches wide and cinched around my hips as tight as they could get it to protect the incision on my belly, and 4 tubes protruding from some very inconvenient parts of my body, but he did it. I doped myself up with my old friend, Percocet, and slept like the dead.